Teaching a School System How To Learn

It's been just over two years since The Public Strategies Group
became the first private company to assume leadership of an entire
public school system, the Minneapolis public schools. Some days, it
feels like it's been a lot longer than that. But I have an important
marker to help me keep time--my daughter. Just as we began the work of
reforming the Minneapolis district, I went home on maternity leave.
During those first months, I kept up with our efforts, all the while
doing radio talk shows across the nation about our one-of-a-kind
arrangement with Minneapolis. Admittedly, it was pretty strange to
answer questions like "What values will you be imparting to our
students?" for cellular-phone callers in Memphis.

Eventually, I became woven into the work of running the district. It
was late August 1994, with the start of school just around the corner.
Little did I foresee that the first major crisis we'd face that fall
would be just getting the kids to school. School opened and our
transportation system was a disaster. Buses were one to two hours late,
scores of students never even got on the bus, and new bus drivers got
lost weaving through unfamiliar Minneapolis streets. The phone system
in the transportation department crashed. Getting home was no better.
Parents waited two hours or more to see their children arrive home, and
at least one child was lost. That was just day one.

Imagine, then, what was going on in our heads this past fall. But
despite all the worrying, we had the best school opening in the
district's history. The turnaround in transportation was just short of
miraculous. It illustrates the value of building a culture of
continuous improvement, one of four challenges we face in transforming
the Minneapolis public schools. Others include seeing information as a
resource, building leadership throughout the organization, and being
accountable for results. What we are really doing in the Minneapolis
schools is teaching an educational system how to learn. Ironically, it
seems the system that teaches kids how to learn every day in the
classroom is also a system far from reaching its own potential as a
learning environment.

Whether we change that depends on how we meet the challenges of
which I spoke. The first, seeing information as a resource, not a tool
of power, will not be easy. In the bureaucratic tradition that built
all of our public schools, information is like money. It's finite, it's
meant to be controlled, and having more of it means having more power.
That's why all the best information in bureaucracies is shared after
meetings, not during them, in the hallways or the bathrooms.

In the Minneapolis public schools, there has been a constant tension
between using information for power and using information as a resource
that can be shared and multiplied. Ideas, once discussed aloud by the
superintendent or district administrators, were usually seen as edicts.
Even the word "draft" meant "final." And in a system with archaic
telephone technology and limited access to voice or electronic mail,
the rumor mill was in its heyday. This was a stark contrast for members
of our company, who openly share information. I can't count how many
times we were accused of having some secret plan we were supposedly
going to foist on the district.

Today, there are still power struggles over information, but to a
lesser degree. In many ways over the past two years, the district has
become more public, openly telling the truth about how well our kids
are doing and how we're acting as stewards of taxpayer dollars.

To fully use this resource, however, we have to build an
infrastructure that improves access to the information we already have
as well as to that in cyberspace. Bringing the district into the 21st
century technologically is a challenge involving millions of dollars.
But we can no longer expect students to function as well-trained,
capable adults if they do not have access to today's technology in our
classrooms.

The second major challenge for the district is building leadership
throughout the organization, not just at the top. History shows that,
as the leadership in our district has changed, so has its direction.
Without the strong grounding in purpose, without a commonly held belief
that we exist to ensure that all students learn, the district has
suffered regular changes of course as the person at the helm was
rotated. The residual impact we're still fighting in this culture is
that of the "survival" motivation. Employees subject to dismissal with
the entrance of a new superintendent learned that in order to survive
you had to just keep on doing what you'd been doing for years. It's a
motto I've heard before: "Lay low, go slow."

Today, we are trying to broaden and strengthen the concept of
district leadership from the superintendent, one individual, to that of
the superintendency, a team of leaders. The superintendency in
Minneapolis today includes the superintendent and 11 other district
leaders whose job is to pursue strategies that ensure that all students
learn. As a group, they are becoming stronger in their capacity to lead
and manage as a team.

In the schools themselves, principals, too, have taken on the
challenge of building their leadership capacity. Their focus is on
meeting all the demands in a site-based environment: being
instructional leaders; team builders among parent, teacher, student,
and community constituents; financial managers; school-operations
managers; and more. Each principal has a development plan that
addresses the many educational and management skills required to build
a school site that excels in student achievement. Our job at the
central office is to support these plans and then get them created with
assistant and interim principals. Our leadership is only as strong as
our bench. Today, it's pretty thin; roughly 60 percent of our
principals have five or fewer years of experience. Nevertheless, I
believe these leaders and those we'll recruit to the district are
capable of building the depth of leadership necessary to stabilize the
course of the district.

Building a culture of continuous improvement is the third challenge.
By and large, in public organizations, employees believe there is only
one right answer and that innocent mistakes can become morning
headlines. We could have fired the transportation director in 1994, for
example, but that would only have reaffirmed the old message that the
system doesn't tolerate any mistakes.

Instead, we and the transportation director together asked, "How
will transportation be improved so that kids are transported safely
each day?" The problems were many. The department had a new
computerized scheduling system which, unfortunately, only a few knew
how to use. The communication system between the department, its
drivers, and route supervisors didn't work. New bus drivers were wholly
unfamiliar with the city of Minneapolis. Perhaps most astounding, our
transportation director learned while charting the scheduling of bus
routes that his employees had anywhere from 10 to 12 working
definitions of "bus stop." That was just the beginning of a full year
spent improving every facet of a large transportation system. Today
that system performs wonders.

Our employees don't yet fully embrace the idea of continuous
improvement. But our motto is "progress, not perfection." What has
characterized progress thus far is that people are involved in
improving their own work and seeing how it connects with the district's
mission, to ensure that all students learn.

The biggest challenge we face in the Minneapolis schools, however,
is being accountable for results, not activity. Two years ago, The
Public Strategies Group asked to be held accountable for results,
including student achievement. We wanted people to understand that
accountability means being in a position to experience the consequences
of one's actions, not blaming others or ducking for cover.

Initially, this drew much skepticism. People asked: "Why should we
pay you for student achievement when the real work happens in a
classroom between teachers and students?"

Our answer? Until we all become accountable for each of our actions,
the students will bear the consequences, not us. If we don't become
accountable, students will continue to struggle to achieve and we will
fail in living up to our mission to ensure that all students learn.

Fortunately, we are making headway. This year, the district and the
teachers' union agreed to a contract that requires teachers to assess
their development against "principles of effective instruction." It
provides incentives for teachers who excel and also provides
outplacement for teachers who cannot meet those expectations. Our
teachers, arguably the group with the most impact on students, are
putting themselves on the line for delivering on student
achievement.

Another example of accountability comes from operations. Each month,
just like you and I, the district pays its bills. Last year, a vendor
payment went unpaid for six months--all $1.6 million of it. (Yes, I
wondered too how a vendor could let $1.6 million go by for six months,
but that's another story). What interested me was that someone had made
a mistake. She just forgot to cut the check. She found that by
admitting her mistake she eliminated any opportunities to blame someone
else. Because of that, she gave herself and others the opportunity to
engage in a conversation focused on learning, not blaming; a
conversation in which the central question was not, "Who did it?" but
"How can we improve our accounting and payment systems to avoid this in
the future?"

Being accountable for results is not easy, and some of our toughest
challenges lie ahead. We are learning that teaching to learn is a very
difficult task and becoming more so every day. The stakes for our
children are incredibly high, and our employees know it. Teachers and
school professionals deserve all the support we can give them,
particularly if they are parents, too. There is not a more important
job than theirs.

Laurie Ohmann is vice president of The Public Strategies Group in t. Paul, Minn. She leads the firm's effort·
to reform educational systems and supports Minneapolis
school executives in their improvement efforts.

Vol. 15, Issue 33, Pages 36, 38

Published in Print: May 8, 1996, as Teaching a School System How To Learn

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